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Campaign Finance
Speaker
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I went to a talk by Lawrence Lessig this evening. He has a new group he's trying to get together to pressure Congress to pass campaign finance reform legislation. So I'll make a low pressure pitch for that at the top here because it seems essentially worthwhile. It's called Rootstrikers. In our brave new post-Citizen's United world where 196 people have put up 80% of the money for super-PACs, and politicians spend 30-70% of their time fundraising, this would seem to be an issue of some urgency no matter what your political leanings. Link here.
But on a slightly less shill-y note, I wanted to have a chat about methods for campaign finance reform. Lessig's group is trying to get Congress to address the issue by hook or crook, but his own personal pet proposal seems a bit hokey to me. He wants to tax every voting age citizen $50. In exchange each citizen would get a voucher for the same amount they could donate to a candidate. The candidate would only be able to redeem the voucher for cash moneys if they promised to find their campaign only through small donations and other good stuff. Given the minuscule turnout for primary elections, I doubt this kind of active voucher primary participation would really reach participation levels that made sense. Does that seem to anyone else like it would be workable? If not, what other methods would pass constitutional review?
But on a slightly less shill-y note, I wanted to have a chat about methods for campaign finance reform. Lessig's group is trying to get Congress to address the issue by hook or crook, but his own personal pet proposal seems a bit hokey to me. He wants to tax every voting age citizen $50. In exchange each citizen would get a voucher for the same amount they could donate to a candidate. The candidate would only be able to redeem the voucher for cash moneys if they promised to find their campaign only through small donations and other good stuff. Given the minuscule turnout for primary elections, I doubt this kind of active voucher primary participation would really reach participation levels that made sense. Does that seem to anyone else like it would be workable? If not, what other methods would pass constitutional review?
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We need to man up and admit it, elections are special things and they must only be determined by the will of the people. All other barriers must be dealt with accordingly.
The voucher idea is kinda crappy both because it is a flat tax and it is forcing people to engage in the political process.
You could just as easily give everyone 10 "speech points" one can give to political organizations to redeem from the government for about $10 each. Sure $30 billion is a lot of money but it is kinda drop in the bucket in the federal budget. You could even let rich people give more in a limited amount and it would still be more balanced then the current system.
I am not sure how to stop politicians from campaigning 70% of the time and actually do their jobs. Until people start actually paying attention to and voting based on what people DO in office (along with voting reforms to get rid of FPTP) I do not think that is going to go away any time soon.
See, you're already opening yourself up to failure the moment you agree to play the numbers game with the Rich. Here's a hint, we've had government by one form of rich aristocracy/plutocracy or another since time immemorial with only a few exceptions in human history. You cannot win that way, because they will find every excuse to create a shell game out of that and then use that shell game to funnel money to support or destroy candidates to further their agenda. They will do this through one form or another of progressively hacking away at everything you've built (as Republicans have been doing since the 1970s to everything progressives made) while lying about the necessity of doing so in absolutely every way they can.
If you give political organizations ten speech points then you're going to see the rich register ten million organizations under every pretext that all just "happen" to align with certain policy positions or ideologies that they support. (No, don't bother putting time requirements on assigning your speech points. The Rich do have the money to blow throwing it into a sinkhole for thirty years just to establish legitimacy. Hence the current think-tank nightmare we're in now.) No, you can't do it short of basically banning independent expenditures and giving each candidate an identical lump sum to campaign with. This means the entire campaign then becomes about the "ground game" and actually engaging voters, versus buying slick media adds and mass mailing campaigns designed to win votes via message saturation.
Sorry I meant 10 points per human being to distribute how they want... basically free individual donations up to a certain amount per person. So a rich person can register as many organizations as they want... they still only get $100 from the government. And maybe they can donate another $1000 of their own, per year per person.
I am using the definition that a person is an individual human. And maybe self aware cats that can talk.
Edit: Also I don't think your going to move away from money controlling speech to a great degree in our society so realistic reforms at this stage need to take that into account. The problem here is not that Joe the plumber is giving $20 to the RNC, it is that Joe the rich guy is giving $TEXAS to the Make Joe Stay Rich Fund.
...sorry. Carry on.
They can still avoid this by paying off people (in one form or another of extra compensation) to donate to their organizations/award their dollars to Pro rich organizations. The problem here is that even if you place each individual on equal spending terms politically:
1: People are not rational
2: People can be coerced
3: Just because it IS illegal does not mean you have the ability to accurately detect and prosecute people suitably for committing crimes.
All you've done is changed the mechanics of how the shell game is played. Hell we had this same sort of a system back in the days of Tammany hall regarding paying people to influence elections. All you've done is abstracted it a little more so that it takes a while for the key oligarchs to figure out how to best win the game. You can't win the game until you can find a way to ban all forms of influence peddling, otherwise you're just going to turn more overt tactics into more covert tactics. Again, take good 'ol Tammany hall. By today's standards what they did was absolutely blatant/appalling and yet we're still fighting the same odious influences that we were then. The only way this is going to happen is when there is 100% accountability in elections and that means there can be no independent expenditures or advocacy groups.
There are simply too many brilliant people who are much smarter than I who are exquisite money launderers. I do not doubt for a moment their ability to re-rig elections as soon as there is the ability to unlevel the economic playing field. So since we can't prevent money laundering the only sensible thing to do is hand each candidate an identical publicly donated lump sum and then require that only official campaigns may perform politicking actions. (you could make one narrow exception for ballot initiatives here, but the pro/anti measure campaigns would still need to have the same public financing equilibrium as candidates) Still, that does mean we need to reinvent some of our party/election mechanics so more people can run for office if they're not a Democrat/Republican, but PACs and lobbyists in practice have all but destroyed the legitimacy of our democracy. They remove a politician's accountability to the people by allowing them to provide stronger positive/negative incentives to politicians than the electorate is capable of mustering on its own.
We need our elections to reflect a little sanity for once.
ANY system can be exploited, the only question is how and how difficult it is. Your system, for example, would make it childishly easy to muzzle scientists. "Global warming is a political issue, illegal campaigning!" "Evolution is a political issue, " etc etc etc etc.
It's probably not an ideal solution, but it is probably the best one that could ever get done. The SCOTUS has made it pretty clear from their recent rulings that any campaign finance reform beyond what is in place now will require an explicit expansion of Congress's power to regulate it. The other option would be to wait for some of the Court conservatives to die and bring a new series of lawsuits through the system, which will probably take even longer than an amendment.
FDR tried that.
There's no reason to do this.
There's tons of reason to do this.
It's just not something you could do without causing a huge political shitstorm.
Replacing them with sane people when they retire will.
What this move is saying is "Oh no, my pile of logs is on fire! Let's throw more logs in there!"
Or just make it so that if they're involved in anything with a whiff of partisanship (i.e. dinners held by people who lobby/pay lobbiers often and hugely, etc.) that lifelong appointment doesn't remain lifelong.
Sure it will. It will shift the court to majority sane justices right now.
"Oh no, my pile of logs is on fire! Let's throw more logs in there, but these dry, dry logs are UNBURNABLE!"
Your dumb analogy is still dumb.
You do realise the last court-extending attempt was EXACTLY for this reason, right? FDR wanted to expand the court so he could appoint a bunch of justices to outnumber the conservative ones who were attacking all his legislation.
People freaked out because it's perfectly within his power and it works.
Obama is in pretty much exactly the same situation right now.
I don't think you're getting the point: why is adding people to the court guaranteed to solve the problem? It may well get the things you want passed, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Also, the FDR court packing plan failed for the same reason an Obama court packing plan would.
Your dumb obstinacy is still dumb.
How ISN'T it guaranteed to solve your problem? If Kennedy was replaced with another Sotomayer or something, do you think we'd be worried about the ACA's mandate right now?
Your entire argument is silly because you completely ignore how the composition of the court effects it's decisions. Adding more justices changes the composition of the court drastically.
And here's there thing: your objection that in the long term it will balance itself back out again as GOP presidents fill up seats as they get vacated, that still doesn't contradict what I said. Because it will take a LONG time for the court to rebalance itself and because when it does ... we are back to exactly where we are now, except with large gains in the meantime. Despite your silly analogy, it doesn't do nothing and we won't return to the status quo because shit will change in the meantime.
The only real danger is that the next GOP president will come back and do the same. But you haven't even mentioned that at all.
And you never said shit about it being "the right thing to do", you said it wouldn't work. When, in fact, it clearly would. And frankly, why isn't it the "right thing to do"?
And why did FDR's court packing plan fail again?
That's right, huge political shitstorm. Which is exactly what I said originally.
It's a plan that works. You just can't go through with it because the public will freak out.
Uh, that makes it a plan that doesn't work.
It's a stupid plan. An easier. better fix is electing people who aren't fucking morons into Congress. Your plan is to just pack more logs on the fire, which is stupid and short sighted.
"electing people who aren't fucking morons into Congress" doesn't change the composition of the SCOTUS. It doesn't do shit unless Scalia or Thomas keels over dead.
Court packing to get your way isn't a good plan because it will be used against you in the future.
Technically, it failed because one of the key players died.
In reality, it succeeded because it made the Court realize that the rest of the US was no longer willing to tolerate the Lochner era attitudes of the court.
Obama and others already managed to pass things.
The problem is, like with FDR, that the court is slapping the laws down.
Court packing to get your way is a bad move. Regardless of why you want to do it, it's something I fundamentally disagree with.
It's not a cure for all ills, though because you're assuming that the people you pack will always toe the line, which is where the hole thing falls apart for me.